They dressed in jeans and dress shirts so as not to stand out. They armed themselves with special Torx screwdrivers. They split their small group into teams of two or three people. Then, on Saturday afternoon, they set about breaking into the “InfoPillars” on Toronto’s sidewalks.

After about four hours, the group had removed advertisements from 35 of 48 pillars across the city and replaced them with poetry and street art. One InfoPillar was cordoned off with a velvet rope and turned into a mini dance club, complete with its own bouncer. Another featured a poster of nothing but a brick wall. One read “We are here; Ads should not be.”

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“We really weren’t trying to hide. These things are more offensive than what we were doing,” said an organizer with the urban guerrilla group, which calls itself cARTography TO, adding that even police driving by did not stop them.

Group members spoke to the National Post on condition of anonymity, wanting to protect themselves from legal action and to ensure their future activism would not be hampered. They said they were appalled by the design of the pillars, which started cropping up last October.

“We got together and started planning an artistic assault against them,” said another cARTography TO activist. “One, to beautify the city and beautify the pillars because we thought they were awful and ugly, but also to raise a lot of awareness on the issue…. They disrupt the flow of traffic for pedestrians. They block the line of sight for cyclists and for drivers.”

The group put out a call to artists within “trusted circles” in January, one of the organizers said.

They met in “safe places where not too many people would be around,” learned how to take apart the pillars and put them back together again, and consulted lawyers on how to protect themselves.

“This is vandalism at its best,” said Anthony Kalamut, a professor of creative advertising at Seneca College. “I have to applaud the creativity that’s involved in this. It’s a massive amount of creativity and co-ordination.”

Mr. Kalamut said the maps and other information that appear on the pillars, alongside advertisements, have a place if they help the public, especially tourists, and if they are not using any public funds.

“This is vandalism at its best. I have to applaud the creativity that’s involved in this. It’s a massive amount of creativity and co-ordination.”

The pillars, owned by Montreal-based Astral Media, were introduced by former mayor David Miller as part of the Toronto Street Furniture program. The city has a 20-year contract with Astral, under which the company uses advertising funds to install and maintain transit shelters, public washrooms, benches and other street furniture. The furniture is valued at $1-billion in total and the city is projected to earn $450-million in ad revenue over the life of the contract, after which the pillars and other furniture become city property.

Astral is contractually required to pay for any damage in the meantime.

Members of cARTography TO replaced one of the screws with their own security screw in order to make it harder for Astral to get back into the boxes. They kept the original ads to give them out to local artists to use in their work.

Councillor David Shiner said there are no plans to redesign the pillars.

“I don’t personally like the pillars on the street, but that’s been dealt with and council’s approved it,” he said.

Toronto artist Sean Martindale donated six pieces of art, to cARTography TO, including a modified bicycle, placed inside one of the pillars.

He supports cARTography TO’s actions, arguing that the pillars are in violation of the city’s own Vibrant Streets guidelines. They state: “The design of new street furniture must demonstrate appropriateness for its intended use, not as a venue for advertising.”

Astral spokesman Hugues Mousseau refused to answer how much it cost the company to fix the pillars, which he said would be done by Tuesday morning. “Astral deplores the acts of vandalism committed this weekend against the InfoPillars in the City of Toronto,” Mr. Mousseau wrote in an email. “The Toronto Street Furniture (TSF) program is a world-class project that provides important services to residents of the City — including transit shelters, litter bins and public benches. It also creates revenue that is exclusively directed for reinvestment in city streets.”

This is not the first time the pillars have been vandalized. Activists broke into several InfoPillar ads in January, converting them into blackboards, and providing chalk for passersby.

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